# Big strings => panic

Tom Ritchford (tom@mvision.com)
Fri, 19 Apr 1996 12:58:01 PDT

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    >On Fri, 19 Apr 1996, Matthew Sanderson wrote:
    >
    >> It seems MOO server 1.7.8p4 panics when a string gets extremely long (I'm
    >> not sure exactly how long, but I would guess LONG long).
    >
    >> foo = " ";
    >> while(1)
    >>   foo = foo + foo;
    >>   $command_utils:suspend_if_needed(0);
    >> endwhile
    >
    >It's not a "bug" per se, nor is it something easily fixed.
    >
    >What happens is simply that when a variable (list or string) gets very
    >large, the server runs out of memory.  (The process hits a process-memory
    >limit, the memory manager is unable to allocate a contiguous block of
    >memory large enough, in extreme cases the swap space is exhausted.)  When
    >the server runs out of memory, it panics -- and in this case probably
    >produces one *very large* panic dump.

    This was successfully to deliberately crash our MOO.  Very annoying!

        /t

    Tom Ritchford     tom@mvision.com, tom@weirdos.com

    Verge's "Little Idiot" -- Music for the mentally peculiar.
    1-800-WEIRDOS           http://www.fly.net/~verge